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No one would say that Sherlock and Joan retired quietly to Upstate New York, when Sherlock’s heart was too overtaxed by even the simplest of tasks to chase down criminals anymore and Joan - who was still living in a state of denial about the whole arthritis complicated with osteoporosis thing - had enough trouble just opening doors, let alone diving into rivers to pull idiot consulting detectives to safety.
Gregson had basically sentenced both of them to permanent retirement when he hung up the badge and gun himself, and his successor deemed Sherlock and his partner a “un-advisable risk to the integrity of police work” and “a hindrance to jurisprudence.”
“Can you believe that, Watson? Us, a hindrance to jurisprudence. We are a catalyst to justice!” He stopped to wheeze for a moment, breath gone from his outburst. Joan stirred her tea silently, feigning ignorance to his condition in a quiet little game that they were both terrible at playing. “It’s political… poppycock, that’s what it is.”
“Neither one of us never really did recover our reputations after that stunt you pulled at Niagara, Sherlock,” Joan agreed neutrally.
“Oh, don’t you go bring that up again.” Sherlock flapped his hands uselessly in her direction. “That was a necessity and we both know that.”
“We do.” Joan blew on her tea and sipped it, making a face at the bitterness since she was supposed to limit her sugar intake now. “But I feel like the Canadians are well within their rights to have banned us both from crossing the border.”
Sherlock smiled victoriously, obviously pleased with himself. They weren’t a pair taken to reminiscence in their youth - both had been too busy running from one thing or another to want to stop and think about any of them - but after a lifetime of good memories to wipe out the past ones, they had grown to nostalgia.
Sherlock kept his bees - it was quite a bit easier to do in the country than it had been in the brownstone - but once he was tied to an oxygen tank, the bees had to be gifted to a teenager in town who had been under Sherlock’s tutelage since she could barely walk. They kept them on their land, though, and she came by like clockwork to harvest the sweet summer honey while Sherlock and Joan sunned themselves on the patio.
“Did you ever think that, one day, you’d own a house in the Catskills, Sherlock?”
“I never quite imagined I’d live long enough to own anything that hadn’t been in my father’s name first.”
“No, I just mean-” Joan sighed, flipping her long salt and pepper hair over her shoulder. “Upstate New York.” She glanced at him, and the pair snorted through their noses.
“It is a tad pretentious of us, isn’t it?”
“We have actual china plates,” Joan laughed. “That match.”
“A gift from Ms. Hudson, but the sentiment comes through loud and clear all the same.”
Sherlock grew quiet, watching the wind blow through the flowers meticulously kept up by a gardener that came on Thursday and whom Joan paid on Fridays, and Joan took the time to study his face. His eyes were amazingly bright, despite his age, but his skin was tough and wrinkled and his hair - what little that was left of it - was short and shockingly white. She could remember when his back had been ram-rod straight, and his shoulders broad, and she compares that memory to the slightly hunched silhouette she sees every morning now. She knew she had changed quite a bit herself - a few inches shorter, and a few pounds heavier than she should be - but she felt suddenly the incredible brevity of their time together.
“There’s a theory, one I’m sure you remember from your medical days, Miss Watson,” Sherlock began again, “that the goal of the older adult is to pass on their amassed wealth and knowledge to their children and grandchildren. Seeing as how we never had any children ourselves, and our true assets do not lie in the money I inherited upon my father’s death, what, then, is our goal? Where do we go from here?”
Joan reached over and wrapped her frail and slightly swollen fingers around Sherlock’s wrist. “I’m writing a book,” she answered. “Nothing too sappy. Just- a memoir, of sorts.”
Sherlock turned his hand over and let their fingers fall together, careful not to squeeze hers too tightly because he knew it pained her. “Mostly fiction, I assume?”
“Of course.” Joan frowned at how cold Sherlock’s hands were even in the summer sunshine. “No one would buy it otherwise.”
Sherlock fell on a Tuesday, trying to get up from the breakfast table. Joan wasn’t able to lift him up by herself, her own crippled back and hands too weak to be much help, and Sherlock could feel his broken hip before Joan had even crouched down to the ground to sit next to him.
“Miss Watson,” Sherlock panted, laying flat of his back. “How long have we been partners?”
“Forty-five years.”
“Forty-five years,” he repeated, and Joan adjusted his oxygen cannula from where it had been jostled out of place from the fall. “That is… quite the accomplishment, I should think. I was quite certain you would have left me a thousand times over, by now, if you had been anyone else but you.”
“Sherlock-“
“Do you remember what I said to you, the very first time we met?”
Joan laughed, because she could now. “You quoted a soap opera to me.”
“Not quoted, Watson. I…” his breath left him again, and Joan turned his oxygen up a liter. “I was able to surmise what they were going to say based on speech patterns and…. oh, you know what I mean. What I’m trying to say is…”
Joan brushed her hand over the edges of his hair, and listened to him breathe.
“I could quote it back to you now, if you’d like, but I’m not quite sure I want my last words to you to be written by someone else.”
“Sherlock, let me call an ambulance.”
“You can,” he acquiesced, but reached up and grabbed her free hand. “In a moment.”
“Sherlock, you are being overly dramatic about this.”
“And you and I both know that my heart, weakened by age and the rampant drug use of my youth, will not survive the surgery.”
Joan had known that, deeply, as a doctor always knows everything that could go wrong at any given moment and does everything they can to prevent it. She had taken all the throw rugs from their home the first time she had tripped and almost broken her wrist many years ago. They had moved their bedroom into the downstairs office when Sherlock could no longer tolerate climbing the stairs each night. But Sherlock had caught the toe of his loafer on the table leg and pitched the entire outfit sideways, taking himself down with it. There were shattered china plates and sugar-free maple syrup dripping onto the hardwood floor around them, and Joan had sat down too closely to a puddle of orange juice, and it was seeping slowly into the fabric of her white dressing gown.
“You had something you wanted to say to me.”
Sherlock wasn’t going to die right then; they both knew that. Joan was going to call the ambulance, and they would go to the hospital. Sherlock would refuse his pain meds, until Joan crushed them and hid them in his pudding, and the physical therapists would try to get him rehabilitated with a shattered hip.
The doctors would say, “the strain on his heart” and “alternative options to surgery” and Joan would nod along, because Sherlock won’t be listening. But Sherlock was going to get worse, not better, and he would eventually slip away from her, in a haze of pain and confusion, and the nurses would be the ones to take care of him in his last days because it would be too much for Joan to roll him around in bed to clean him up and change his sheets herself.
Joan would plan a funeral, and invite all of their friends who were still living, and she would keep on living in their house in the Catskills that they bought with cash just to watch the real estate guy’s face, writing her book and remembering Sherlock.
But that’s all going to be weeks from now, maybe even months. Right now, Sherlock wants to tell her his last words, before the tediousness of life and death got in the way.
“Yes, well.” Sherlock raised her hand to his face, and kissed her palm. Their hands were both wrinkled, and the skin was translucent and thin. Joan could see the spidery blue veins crawling under her skin, and the back of Sherlock’s hand was covered with brown age spots. “I have known a great many things in my years and forgotten a great deal more, and I must say… Of all the things I have ever known, you, Miss Watson, are the greatest knowledge I have ever had.”
She called the ambulance after that, because it was the thing to do, and laid her head on Sherlock’s chest. She listened to the persistent rattle of fluid in his lungs that had been the lullaby that played her to sleep at night for the last few years, and she waited.